Two conceptions of moral and civic education confronted each other in the Athens of the late fifth century, competing for the allegiance of parents and young men. On one side (observes the Stranger from Elea in Plato's Sophist) was

On the other is the claim of the expert: moral education is useless unless it is guided by a precise practical skill, akin to scientific knowledge.

Of the many extraordinary features of Aristophanic comedy, none is more extraordinary than its lyrics – especially, I am tempted to add, if one includes under that heading some of the comments that the lyrics themselves have engendered. The present essay has three main objects: to oppose what seems to be a general notion of Aristophanes as a writer of ‘serious’ lyric poetry; to clarify the conceptual basis of this notion; and to offer a reinterpretation of his actual achievement as a lyric poet.

The general view is easily stated. In the first place, Aristophanes is ‘a master of lyric poetry in every vein, humorous, solemn, or delicate’ (Dover). And in particular, his lyrics ‘frequently rise to the level of authentic high poetry’ (Rau). The fact is that he has an ‘enchanting, airy manner, which is among the glories of Greek lyric poetry’ (Bowra). Hence his lyrics can be spoken of in the same breath as the poems of Pindar and Keats (Stanford); or, not to mince words, ‘some of the finest Greek lyrics – and that is to say some of the finest lyrics produced by the human genius – are found in his plays' (Harsh). Such statements tend to be supported by disappointingly little in the way of analysis or comparison or indeed argument of any kind, but their authors indicate sufficiently clearly their agreement on which particular lyrics and which kinds of lyric in general they have in mind.

No special justification is needed for a new collection of interpretive essays on Aristophanes: of all the major writers of the fifth century he is surely (at least in the English-speaking world) one of the most neglected by classicists. The absence of up-to-date texts and commentaries for most of the plays exacerbates the problem. As anyone who has tried to teach Aristophanes in Greek or in translation will attest, the task of making the plays available to students is beset by many formidable problems not encountered in the case of other Greek authors. Aristophanes is a comic playwright composing in a defunct and often alien mode about topical subjects only imperfectly intelligible to a distant posterity. An ancient tragedian, historian, philosopher or orator has at least the advantage of writing in forms either still viable or made much more viable by extensive scholarly and critical exegesis. It seems to me that as a result an unfortunate trend has developed: Aristophanes, despite his own insistence to the contrary and despite his having written about the same topics as his contemporaries, has more and more been denied the status of a serious and/or intelligible spokesman for his times. Rather than perform the difficult job of establishing a methodology for deciding the matter one way or the other, many scholars have decided that Aristophanes is primarily a humorist of genius whose views about matters of perennial concern are either undiscoverable or, if discoverable, much less important and useful than those recoverable from other contemporary sources.

The successful production in recent years of the so-called peace plays of Aristophanes in a number of German theaters provides a challenge for classical scholars to renew analysis of these comedies. Peter Hacks' adaptation of Peace, which opened in Berlin, has been a popular success in many theaters. Acharnians, in the adapted translation of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, was accepted much less readily, but Lysistrata, for many years the most frequently performed comedy of Aristophanes, has since 1972 had outstanding success in a new translation by Schadewaldt. In this essay I shall attempt to answer the challenge posed by these theatrical successes primarily by examining the differences between the three comedies in their treatment of war and peace. In addition, I hope to demonstrate an aspect of Lysistrata that has until now received scant notice.

Accordingly, let us turn directly to the question of exactly how Aristophanes represents war and peace in his peace-plays and how he brings the concept of peace to dramatic life on the stage; for while he manages to accomplish peace in all three comedies, the nature and presentation of peace differ greatly from play to play.

The action of Acharnians, produced in 425, the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War, is highly political from the very opening scene. The farmer, Dicaeopolis, is shocked that all attempts to deliberate about peace in the Assembly have failed.